Your Right to Know

LONDON — President Barack Obama’s speech emphasizing soft power and alliances over military
might crystallized into a single address what many experts said yesterday was an inevitable — and
welcome — evolution of U.S. foreign policy.

The president who pulled U.S. troops from Iraq, avoided direct confrontation in Syria and has
tapered off the American military presence in Afghanistan seemed to be saying that the United
States had learned that it cannot impose its will on the rest of the world, said David Livingstone,
an expert in international security at London’s Chatham House. He said Obama’s words went against
the “American instinct to go in hard with the military first” when crisis erupts.

“America has to be in sympathy with the world, and its leadership has been perceived to be
unilateral,” he said after listening to Obama’s speech at West Point.

In the Gulf state of Qatar, Brookings Center director Salman Shaikh said the speech broke no new
ground for a president who has distanced himself from the “interventionist wars” of predecessor
George W. Bush.

Obama devoted his most muscular language to counterterrorism, particularly in Syria. Without
specifying, Obama talked about supporting Syria’s moderate opposition fighting to oust President
Bashar Assad.

Obama put off any hint of using force there or in Iran, where he touted a possible deal over its
nuclear program.

“He was clear that this is his foreign-policy legacy, he hopes, when it comes to the Middle
East,” Shaikh said, adding that Obama was “relatively weak” when pressing issues like human rights
and democracy.

Boaz Ganor, an Israeli counterterrorism expert, said Obama’s speech revealed a lack of
understanding of the global threat of terrorism. He disagreed with Obama’s assertion that al-Qaida
is less dangerous now.

“Maybe a 9/11 type of attack right now from a centralized al-Qaida in a lesser probability. But
a decentralized al-Qaida is even more dangerous than a centralized al-Qaida because these splinter
groups, these embryonic new al-Qaida organizations will emerge and will no doubt down the road try
to hit the U.S. mainland and will inspire many followers in the United States.”

Some, including Gordon Adams, professor of international relations at American University in
Washington, think the president might have promised more than American deliver.

“The underlying premise here is that the United States is indispensable to all these troubles
and the solution depends on the United States intervening,” he said. “We’re going to be part of the
solution to a lot of these problems, but setting us up to expect that we can solve them by force or
goodwill perpetuates a myth in a rapidly changing world where we don’t have the capacity to do that
anymore. It’s not American decline. It’s the global system rebalancing itself.”